


Ring

by Batik



Series: Music to their ears [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, a bit angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:56:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batik/pseuds/Batik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock comes to appreciate the benefit of phoning versus texting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ring

**Author's Note:**

> I'm generally all about fluff, so I'm not sure where the angst is coming from, but this definitely is a bit angsty.
> 
> Thanks to my beta/Brit-picker, [Nichellen](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Nichellen/pseuds/Nichellen), who helped me make this concept work — and who calls me on it every time I think I'm getting the "British" correct but am more off base than I would have been if I hadn't tried!

Texting had long been his preferred method of communicating. Quick. Efficient. To the point. With the very way of it discouraging inane, boring conversation.

That hadn’t stopped Sherlock from dialing John’s number when he’d found the antiquated public telephone on the street corner in Bucharest. He knew it was a bad idea. No matter how far removed from the real world he felt — Bucharest might as well have been another planet rather than simply 1,300 miles away from London — he was all too aware that it remained the same world in which people were all too eager to aim a sniper’s rifle at John’s temple. In Sherlock’s name.

Still, it had been weeks — possibly months; he refused to allow himself to acknowledge the subconscious count tucked in a far corner of his mind — since he had left John behind to take up the chase, and he could feel himself beginning to unravel faster than Moriarty’s tangled web. He needed to hear John’s voice so he could collect himself enough to pick up his own threads and carry on.

He knew it was a direct response to hearing that infernal song on the radio at that dive of a diner where he’d practically collapsed after pushing himself too hard for too long on too little food and sleep. But, like so many things, the song was part of his and John’s history and, thus, was not to be deleted.

And as much as he couldn’t claim that ’70s power ballads were really in keeping with his musical tastes, he’d memorized the lyrics after John set the stereo in 221b on repeat during one of their I’m-not-really-angry-but-it’s-fun-to-annoy-you arguments about the benefits of actual, occasional phone conversations as compared to refusing to do more than text.

Sherlock found himself replaying the lyrics in his head as he waited for the phone to make a connection and start ringing. They seemed just about right for what he wanted to say, even if he knew he wouldn’t say anything.

“Hello. How are you? Have you been all right through all those lonely nights?”

Ring.

“That’s what I’d say; I’d tell you everything. If you’d pick up that telephone.”

Ring.

Ring.

A dozen rings and John hadn’t answered.

Sherlock inhaled deeply, straightened his shoulders, oh-so-carefully replaced the handset in its cradle and turned out of the box to head casually up the street. Despite his calm demeanor, he clenched his jaw tightly, the only indication passersby might have had of the emotions that flooded him, the ones that made him want to rip the handset from the phone — if not the entire phone from its supports — and send it crashing through the box’s glass walls.

As much as he was willing to chance a call to John, though, he wasn’t willing to risk all his efforts for the sake of a tantrum. He also wasn’t sure what the Romanian criminal code said about punishment for the destruction of public utilities and didn’t want to find out the hard way.

***

“Hey. How you feelin’? Are you still the same?”

It was a legitimate question, even if Sherlock wasn’t going to get a real answer — from the song or from John.

The call from the French farmhouse in Britanny didn’t afford Sherlock any better luck than the pay phone in Bucharest had. He had enough money left from snapping that thread of Moriarty’s web in Belarus to convince the farm’s owner to let him both use her private phone line to make an international call and to offer him privacy as he did so.

Little good it was doing him.

“Don't you realize the things we did were all for real, not a dream?”

Another too-sharp ring punctuated Sherlock’s thoughts as the lyrics flowed freely through his mind, and he again gently hung up the phone, hand lingering on the receiver as his voice raised to a whisper.

“I just can't believe, they've all faded out of view.”

* * *

John faced down the dark stone slab. The cemetery wasn’t a place he visited often. He didn’t need to come here to “talk” to Sherlock, not when he heard echoes of that deep voice everywhere he went.

Still, sometimes he felt the need to escape London’s voices. The cemetery stored its own obvious pain, but it somehow seemed less real than the pain that twinged through John every time he hailed a taxi or felt obligated to eat at Angelo’s, just to keep up appearances that he was in some small way OK.

He knew he wasn’t, but he couldn’t handle anymore of his friends’ pitying looks, so he buried himself in trying to seem fine, even as he secretly doubted he would ever again be anything better than a bit not good.

John raised his head and his view of Sherlock’s grave was replaced by a broad strip of sky. Any evidence of London — distant as it was — was blocked by the natural rise and fall of the land, and sky and trees were all there was to see. He suspected Sherlock would find it all incredibly boring, however scenic.

A memory of Sherlock proclaiming “dull” melded with the billowy clouds before John’s eyes and tugged at something that had been buried deep in his memory.

“I look into the sky,” John heard himself say out loud, even as the silent — if never quiet — voice in his head offered “the love you need ain’t gonna see you through.”

“And I wonder why,” John continued, before his voice trailed off, the lyrics too close to home to be comfortable or comforting.

“The little things are finally coming true,” his inner voice persisted. He pushed that one away, not understanding it nearly as clearly as he had the earlier words.

With a slight shake of his head to clear his thoughts and bring himself out of the haze into which he had slipped, John clenched his hand, tapped his knuckles twice — gently — on the top of the headstone, turned and walked away.

* * *

Sherlock’s long fingers wrapped around the phone, white-knuckled. No matter how many times he swore he wouldn’t do it again, that it was too risky, he once again had dialed John’s number. This time from Belgium.

His efforts had been paying off, and he had been sweeping away larger and larger pieces of Moriarty’s web. It had cost him, though. At least he had been in one of the more civilized nations when he found himself in need of medical care. He hadn’t had to worry that unsanitary conditions would succeed in killing him after so many others had tried — rather desperately — and failed.

Sherlock was recovering from his injuries — the same couldn’t be said for his assailant — and was about to be discharged from the hospital. Rather, he was about to walk out of the hospital under cover of the evening shift change and the falling darkness.

Seeing the bedside phone made his fingers twitch, though, and he grabbed for it, willing the faintly lingering fog of the medication into submission. Later, if he remembered, he would blame the medication for the words he spoke. However accurate to the situation, they were sentimental and, John history or not, he would have preferred not to say them aloud.

“Telephone line, give me some time, I’m living in twilight.”

...

“Telephone line, give me some time, I’m living in twilight.”

That he repeated the line, even if only in his head, definitely ranked them as a side effect of the medicine, even if he had taken the last dose hours ago.

He was perhaps 15 rings in when the international operator stated the obvious.

“OK, so no one’s answering,” he replied curtly. “Well, can't you just let it ring a little longer?”

Even as the operator agreed, Sherlock continued speaking — more to himself than to the operator — as he mentally shuffled his plans to escape the hospital that evening.

“I’ll just sit tight, through the shadows of the night. Let it ring for evermore.”

Ring.

Ring.

“Hello? … Hello? Is someone there?”

“John?”

**Author's Note:**

> Electric Light Orchestra released "Telephone Line" on the album "A New World Record" in 1976 and as a single in 1977. It reached No. 7 on the U.S. Billboard charts and No. 8 in the U.K.
> 
> The lyrics:
> 
> Hello. How are you?  
> Have you been all right, through all those lonely nights?  
> That's what I'd say, I'd tell you everything,  
> If you'd pick up that telephone.
> 
> Hey. How you feelin’?  
> Are you still the same  
> Don't you realize the things we did were all for real not a dream,  
> I just can't believe  
> They've all faded out of view.
> 
> I look into the sky  
> (the love you need ain’t gonna see you through.)  
> And I wonder why  
> (the little things are finally coming true.)
> 
> Chorus  
> Telephone line, give me some time, I’m living in twilight  
> Telephone line, give me some time, I’m living in twilight
> 
> OK, so no one’s answering.  
> Well, can't you just let it ring a little longer?  
> I’ll just sit tight, through the shadows of the night.  
> Let it ring for evermore.


End file.
